Robin Friday was the greatest footballer you never saw. Here's why. It is February 1974 and Fourth Division Reading are playing Doncaster Rovers. Friday is standing about 25 yards from goal when he shouts for the ball. As it arrives Friday does something no one expects. He hits the ball first time with the outside of his foot. From a seemingly impossible angle the ball passes the static goalkeeper and then – as intended – swerves at the last minute into the net. The stadium erupts. Two years later Reading play Tranmere Rovers. Friday, by now the town's hero, is about 35 yards from the Rovers goal when the ball hurtles towards him. Somehow he controls it on his chest and then hits the ball with his right foot. Before turning. The velocity of the ball is so powerful that within two seconds it is nestling in the top right-hand corner of the Rovers net. For a few seconds there is absolute silence in the stadium as everyone – players, staff and fans – tries to understand what has just happened. After the game the referee, Clive Thomas, announces: "Even up against the likes of Pele and Cruyff that rates as the best goal I have ever seen."

That year Reading are promoted to the Third Division. Without Robin Friday this would never have happened. Fact. Yet within three months the club have sold him to Cardiff City and six months later Robin has left the game for good. How could such a mercurial talent never play top-flight football or be placed in that great line of 70s artisans, Best, Bowles, etc?

Because Robin Friday played life in the same way he played football. Off the field he ran riot in Reading. He smoked spliff, dropped pills, drank heavily and accommodated every woman that came his way. If George Best was football's first pop star, Robin was the game's first rock star. Friday's off-field activities gained such potency that visiting scouts from top clubs – and there were many – refused to countenance signing a man of such unpredictable actions. The summer-long celebrations he undertook after hauling Reading into the Third Division in 1976 then signalled an unstoppable physical decline. Hence the move to Cardiff.

On his debut he introduced himself to Fulham's Bobby Moore by squeezing his testicles. The day before he had been arrested for bunking the train from Reading to Cardiff. In addition, Robin played in an era when football was not subject to the blanket media coverage it endures today. The only time Reading appeared on television for example was when the local station filmed them. He remained a hero at his clubs but hidden from the nation.

Robin walked out of Cardiff and football in the summer of 1977. Twelve years later he was found dead of a suspected heroin overdose. Hundreds and hundreds of people attended his funeral. In the year 2000 Reading fans overwhelmingly voted him their player of the century. There could be no finer accolade for the man.

• Paolo Hewitt's book The Greatest Footballer You Never Saw: The Robin Friday Story is published by Mainstream Sport